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Saturday, 15 August 2015

Vanity Project

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that you should never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. I’d imagine that the
Conservatives must be enjoying not interrupting the spectacle of the Labour
leadership contest, in which Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign -having started out as a
bit of a joke- has gathered enough momentum to make the prospect of victory
quite realistic.

I happen to believe that Mr. Corbyn is wrong
about most things, but I respect principled politics and principled politicians;
our national discourse is all the richer when ideas (from the left or the
right) are presented honestly to the electorate. Elections though, are usually
decided by a huge number of floating voters and, as a consequence, pragmatism
invariably trumps principle. The evidence of the last few decades indicates that the Labour Party doesn't do pragmatism very well, because it hasn't been very good at spotting -and picking- ‘winning’ leaders. Of its last seven choices, only one managed to win an election and his
name (Lord Voldemort) is never mentioned now in polite company.

With that in
mind, the impulse to elect Mr. Corbyn looks -from the outside- like some kind
of death wish, oddly reminiscent of when the Conservatives put Ian Duncan-Smith
at the helm in 2001. IDS might have appealed to a large proportion of their
grass roots supporters, but he had absolutely no chance of becoming
Prime-Minister. Anyone who wasn’t a ‘grass roots’ Tory back then could see
that, just as anyone who is not a grass roots ‘principled’ leftist now can see
that the electorate will never hand Jeremy Corbyn the keys to 10 Downing
Street. The Conservatives at least recognised their
mistake quite quickly and, within two years of his coronation, Duncan-Smith was
forced out. His successor, Michael Howard, knew that his job was not to win the
2005 election, but to stop the rot and lay the groundwork so that the leader
who followed him could have a decent stab at victory in 2010.

The Corbynistas are perfectly entitled to follow
their principles and 'go left', but they won’t get a Labour
government; in fact, they’ll be lucky to have a Labour Party at all (although I
suspect that some kind of schism is what some of them really want). If their candidate
wins, they can -to paraphrase David Steel’s oft-quoted remark- go back to their
constituencies and prepare for a decade of oblivion. The 2020 election can be
written off and, perhaps, 2025 as well. The task faced by whoever succeeds
Corbyn will be so huge that s/he might –like Michael Howard- be able only to
lay the groundwork for his or her successor to win in 2030, by which point the electorate
will presumably be fed up of 20 years of uninterrupted Conservative rule. It
hardly needs pointing out here that a Corbyn victory would delight the SNP, because
they’ll be looking to exploit what they would see as the rich opportunities
afforded by continued Conservative hegemony.

I can understand why folk born from the
mid-seventies onwards might have a romantic view of the Corbyn candidature,
because they may not know much about Labour’s last significant lurch to the
left, when a ridiculously ‘principled’ manifesto led to humiliation at the
polls in 1983. Older Labour supporters though, don’t have that excuse. If
you’re old enough to remember 1983 and you’re still backing Corbyn, you can’t
seriously claim to have Labour’s interests at heart, at least not the ‘broad church’
Labour Party that was once serious about winning elections. Anyone who thinks
that it lost in 2015 because it wasn't far enough to the left is seriously
deluded. The fact is that Labour loses UK elections when it goes left and, if you’re
looking for evidence to back up that statement, I’ll simply refer you to every
general election result of the last 50 years.

The British political system works best
when there is a strong opposition to hold the ruling party to account. Without that,
all governments become complacent and corrupt (or perhaps that should read:
even more complacent and corrupt). The incumbents have to believe that there is
a genuine prospect of them being evicted by the electorate at the next time of
asking; in that sense, a Corbyn-led Labour Party won’t provide any sort of
meaningful opposition.

As it pauses at this existential fork in
the road, Labour should consider that it owes something to the country, not
least to the 9.5 million people who voted for them and the millions of floating
voters who could, in the right circumstances, be persuaded to elect a
centre-left government. Instead of indulging in a vanity project, the party
should reflect on the fact that it owes it to those voters to act like an effective
opposition.

If it puts Mr. Corbyn at the helm, we might,
over the next few years, get some interesting debates and some wacky ideas
about wealth appropriation, but we won’t get the most important thing of all: a
sense that here lies a government in waiting.

About Me

A few years ago, I promised that I would never start a blog; this is it.
On this blog, I plan to respond to real (or imagined) slights by posting coruscating put-downs of my enemies, competitors and -occasionally- friends. I also plan to maintain the acrimonious simmering of a series of longstanding grudges and petty disputes.
But mainly, the blog will faithfully record a pointless and pedestrian series of idle musings, attempted libels and ill-considered theories about popular culture, sport, politics, music and the meaning of life.
For the last couple of years, I've been writing about an album I'm recording; yes, it's nearly finished.
The views represented on this blog are not necessarily endorsed by the author, unless they are.